ROLL CALL
by nathan-p
Summary: Whatever this is, I didn't sign on for it. ::INVESTIGATE. A series of short pieces about life at the School. Third chapter: Why would you name someone that? You should be ashamed.
1. ROLL CALL

10 PRINT "ROLL CALL";

20 GOTO 10

* * *

><p><em>Who the fuck are these assholes?<em>

* * *

><p>"Ratchet". Huh.<p>

Reilly squinted at the screen, counting out the letters. R - A - T - C - H - E - T.

OK, he wasn't hallucinating.

_What the fuck kind of name is that..._

It wasn't like most of the kids had the best names ever anyway. "Maximum"? Whatever. "Fang" was extremely questionable, but they both got grandfathered in, as it were - no one Reilly knew remembered why the six kids were named what they were.

Except maybe Jeb, and he wasn't telling.

Bastard probably thought it was hilarious.

"Ratchet." He frowned. For some reason the name reminded him of video games.

* * *

><p>"Holden. Are you fucking serious. <em>Holden<em>."

It wasn't quiet in the office area - too much keyboard-clicking and the burble of the coffee machine - but he could swear he heard a laugh. Or a stifled snicker or something.

Someone was amused at his bemusement.

Fuck 'em.

_Jesus, I hated that book._

(Mostly because some douche suckup with a nice ass had given a fucking soliloquy on the thing for his final in English class. It wasn't the soliloquy that was the problem so much as the fact that it was all about the deep historical symbolism of the plot, and the fact that he went ten minutes over time.)

Holden. What do his friends call him, Holdy? Hold my _cock_.

Asshole.

* * *

><p>Kate. Beth.<p>

_Who the shit..._

At least those were normal names. For a given value of normal.

Kate was a common one, kind of. Beth not so much.

If these kids were who he was told they were, they were fuckin' weird as shit names. This was the same group that boasted "Nudge" and "Iggy".

Next to that, Kate and Beth might as well have been named "Sunshine" and "Starsong" or some shit.

* * *

><p>Toni. Normal-like. Kind of stupid. From the spelling probably a girl.<p>

Who named these kids? They sounded so normal, these... five. Six. These six. He could swear he'd known friends' baby siblings named Antonia or Katherine, kids by now who'd be going by Kate and Toni.

Why do we name our weapons like we're naming our children?

* * *

><p>Star. Of course there was a Star.<p>

There were the hipster asshole parents - paging Holden, Holden to a white courtesy telephone - and there were the traditionalists - Kate or Beth, either one of you interchangeable fuckers - and then there were the ones who didn't know it wasn't still 1969.

Poor kid. In a class full of Tiffaneighs and Jessikas, to be the only Star?

(He'd been named Beau, but there were places for such names.)

* * *

><p><em>unknown<em>

_unknown_

_unknown_

He hit refresh again.

Technically speaking he was still an intern. No one remembered but him, but he was just a cog in this machine.

Well. A cog important enough to manage a six-unit field team mostly on his own, but a cog.

And they were his cogs - his to control. He'd programmed the server that sent them their commands. He spoke in their ears when they strayed off task.

He moved them at his whim from place to place, but he couldn't say he wasn't relieved when their locations changed from UNKNOWN.

* * *

><p><em>Who are you?<em>


	2. GRAVEYARD SHIFT

The kid won't stop coughing.

He's out of healthy mucus to cough up; now he wheezes and hacks dryly, skinny shoulders shaking as his body responds to a stimulus you can't find.

Your colleague - superior, colleague, friend, all the same, really - gets up from where he was kneeling next to the kid. He strips off his gloves and tosses them in the trash can across the room.

"What's he got?" you ask, knowing that he won't have an answer any more than the last two experts who examined the kid did, or any more than you did when he started coughing up neon-green shit.

"Kennel cough," he snarls through his facemask, blue eyes narrow and angry above the paper.

You step out of his way, feeling a little less like his equal, a little more like a peon in his wake.

He doesn't step by you; he pats you on the shoulder instead, apologizing for... something. "Sorry, Reilly. These things happen."

You nod dumbly.

He smiles before he leaves, but all you can see is the faint crinkle at the corners of his eyes.

* * *

><p>[BE THIS GUY]<p>

* * *

><p>That's not your name.<p>

* * *

><p>[BE BEAUREGARD REILLY]<p>

* * *

><p>Fine.<p>

* * *

><p>Your name is Beauregard Reilly. You are an intern here, which means you are everyone's lab bitch and no one's superior.<p>

Unless you count the kids.

Today you are caring for one of the kids assigned to you after your recent semi-promotion, forced upon you by the unfortunate and totally accidental death of your immediate superior.

You can barely keep a fish alive on your own, but it is kind of cool being responsible for things this important.

Luckily for you, the other five are in good health. This one caught a minor cold last week from a lab tech who came to work during the symptomatic phase of a strep infection.

Unfortunately, due to his strange biology, this kid didn't catch a cold, or strep. Well, maybe he has strep. You can't get a culture started from him.

* * *

><p>[BE THIS KID]<p>

* * *

><p>He's asleep. As much as you can sleep while you're coughing that hard.<p>

* * *

><p>[DON'T BE THIS KID]<p>

This kid is named Ratchet. You are not sure why. You didn't name him. It is definitely a stupid name, though it's not like you could have come up with a better one yourself.

You're only an intern anyway. You don't get to name things.

The kid coughs again, ribs contracting and squeezing inward hard. If he were human he'd have broken at least one by now. He was on sedatives for a while, before you discovered he's allergic to the ones that work on the other five. Finding something new that works would take too long.

So you're stuck playing babysitter for graveyard shift, watching the second hand sweep silently around the clock face, listening to racking coughs and miserable wheezing, unable to do a thing.

* * *

><p>[DO SOMETHING]<p>

* * *

><p>You could, but you'd like to keep this job.<p>

* * *

><p>[DO NOTHING]<p>

* * *

><p>That's the spirit.<p> 


	3. SUBJECT DESIGNATION

He rolled his eyes.

"Jesus, who's been letting Reilly name the subjects again?"

It was a relatively harmless habit, but the higher-ups found it annoying. The regional director had called the practice to a stop after discovering "Shinji", "Kaworu", and "Rei" in the nursery one morning, but Reilly had continued on the sly.

As long as nothing went on the official tags, it was considered fine to nickname the subjects. But it seemed someone was having trouble remembering his childish naming choices.

He erased "Thorn" from the SUBJECT DESIGNATION field and copied over the classification number.

"Mari Illustrious" had been only the beginning of the fad.

* * *

><p>"Shadow Raven? Wasn't he a boss in-?"<p>

Reilly glanced up from his clipboard. "That's Vulcan Raven. And Shadow's on your left; Raven's on supervised exercise time right now." He scribbled the time and added, "Also, no, I didn't name them."

"Because they won't let you anymore."

He leveled a cool glare at Phil over his glasses. "No, because I got bored."

(And he'd run out of names.)

* * *

><p>"Alyssa? Koden? You're not naming kids here, or even your pet goldfish. You are assigning unoffical designations to test subjects."<p>

"Yes sir."

"You're not in the fucking army any more. That's 'doctor' to you."

"Yes, doctor," he said, contemplating keying the living shit out of her car at the end of the day.

Wasn't like it hurt anyone to call the subjects silly names.

* * *

><p>"Thomas. Follow me." Reilly beckoned the junior scientist towards him. "Let me show you how we do things around here."<p>

Reilly set off for the east wing at a fair clip, leaving Thomas Pullman scrambling in his wake. For a recent amputee recovering from a wicked case of what scuttlebutt held to be space AIDS, he was nearly manic in his energy.

He rapped on the door of gamma team's bunkroom, then waved it open with his card. "Jim, Bones, Chekov, Sulu, out. Team exercises today." He scanned the room and pointed to someone Pullman couldn't see. "You too."

As the team filed out, Reilly smiled. "That's how we do things, Thomas. Even if their names are fucking stupid, you still have to call them. Gives a personal touch." He frowned and glanced back into the room.

"You! Spock, whatever your name is! Out!"

* * *

><p>"Are you Korean?"<p>

He shook his head meekly.

"Are they Korean?"

(No, they're human/snake crosses; indeterminate lineage on the human side, king cobra on the snake.) "No, sir."

"Then why in the living fuck did you name them Chulsoo and Younghee?"

"Thought it sounded cool." And it was too fucking hard to call them by numbers for testing.

Reilly sighed. "I can't slap you for being a fuckwit, but I can assign you to Eraser duty. Two weeks cleaning their dorms and dealing with their shit. Go have a coffee and report to Masterson."

* * *

><p>"What's their deal over there? First the weird names, now Batchelder running off," he said to his colleague.<p>

"There's something in the water in California, I think," replied ter Borcht. He took a sip of his coffee. "Makes them all fucking crazy."


End file.
